Community Review: Project CARS

Car simulators have never been my thing but we've had Project CARS running in our office on a $10,000 PC and yeah... it is a very good looking video game.

It's also, by all accounts, and from what I've played a very good video game to play if you're into the whole pitch perfect replication of all aspects of car physics and what not. I'm not into that kind of thing. I like Mario Kart. I'm hyped about the 200cc mode. That's where I'm at.

But Gizmodo Editor Luke Hopewell, and US Kotaku Contributing Editor Luke Plunkett, they seem to be loving Project CARS and I have to take their word for it. I'll say one thing: it's been anexperience to play it for roughly 15 minutes and fun to watch it run on a beastly computer.

I've been an early backer of the game since 2012, so I've been playing builds as the game progressed for most of this time, but stopped about mid last year.

This was my exact feeling with the game. It was a great sim, the cars handled great, the environments were great, but I never actually had fun playing it. The menus were clunky, the AI wasn't great, and the overall experience was just very, very, very dry and didn't have any feel to it.

More recently, they transitioned the backer plans, and my tier [team member] doesn't come with an actual retail copy of the game. My copy of Project CARS was removed from my steam library, and replaced with a 50% off coupon for the game. I don't really mind [though it is creepy watching a game being remotely removed from your Steam library, but that's another discussion...], as with the discount and my original pledge I'm basically paying the same full price amount. But with my experiences in the pre-release builds I'm hesitant to actually put any more money into the game.

If the full release feels the same way, as this comment suggests, I think I'll just cut my losses and let this one slide as a bad investment ;-)

**EDIT: Updated to reflect my backer plan. I checked my email receipts [had to dig back 3 years] and found I had purchased a lower tier than I recalled..... I'd like to clarify that the devs have not removed full copies of the game from anyone.

Wow, I'm shocked with the removal of your copy of Project Cars. They can't just change the terms like that and remove something you've purchased.

I'm sure consumer and business affairs would have some really interesting things to say about that, regarding them entering into a contract by allowing you to purchase a future version of the game and then changing the contract terms when it no longer suited them.

You do realise they were also offered a refund of the money paid right? you had three option as per my memory (since this happened well over a year ago possibly two.) 1. you got your money back 2. you got a discount on the full price 3. you paid 5 or 10 dollars to upgrade to a full copy.

Plus I'm sure with the pages and pages of legalese we had to wait through to sign up covers them.

For instance when you joined up you were not buying the game you were "investing" and gaining access to the beta. The full game was one of many rewards offered for backing depending on your "investment." the rewards were not finalised until about 6 months after the initial start up (which it clearly stated on the page.)

Thinking about this, I decided to actually work out which tier I had. Found the receipt from 2012 [wow! time flies! heh], and it turns out I was tier 2, which according to their member table never came with a full copy of the game.

I've updated my post to reflect that they have not removed copies they promised to any backer. My bad for the confusion!

No worries mate, I've been reading a lot into projects being pre-purchased and the delivery or lack of delivery of their end product.
So many companies seem to forget that their consumers still have consumer rights, when they try things like a "no refund" policy.
Opening themselves up to trade worldwide means they have to abide by each country and territories consumer laws.

While (IMHO) it's perhaps not the most graphically striking racer I've played (I prefer Driveclub on a pure visual note, but not necessarily as a whole). I'm not really a simulator fan TBH, so I do miss some of the more 'arcade' feedbacks (Sounds etc) from other racers, but understand that that's not the type of game this is, hence wouldn't hold it against PCars.

I'm enjoying the (again IMHO) unrivalled flexibility that the game seems to offer. Things like cockpit view without a wheel seems so logical.

Edit: And performance is sub-par on my AMD card. I have a 970 coming from Amazon, but man. Digital Foundry found that nVidia cards have up to a 70% advantage compared to an equivalently powered AMD card in this game, which is pretty shocking.

I wasn't to impressed with the amd optimisation either, It has taken me hours to get it running nicely on mine with an r290x. It's holding 60fps @1080 now, but I have had to turn a few things off or to low to get it.

By far the most enjoyable racing experience I have had in my gaming life.
Perfect integration with G27, most fun i've had with it yet. Also runs beautifully on 3770k / GTX670 and looks better than anything I have seen running on a piece of hardware.

9/10 because of the woeful car line-up, which one would hope is vastly improved in future DLC.

Liking it so far. Lots of options to customise the game to make it as easy or difficult as you want. Plenty of cars on track, decent car and track selection (could be more of each, but the ones they chose are mostly good). Would love to see either Phillip Island or Adelaide Street Circuit in the future.

im not sure, i read somwhere someone trying to compare it to gran turismo (and forza, but, i haven't played forza, so i can't comment on that)
gran turismo is shit.
it is an arcade game.

anyways, onto Project Cars
after taking an hour or so to set up my G27 (custom pedal's & load sensor), got into it, practised a little to get a feel for the game (love the 98t), it feels good, you can feel bumps well, all seems to do what you want a game to do.

The good:
-on a bumpy corner, you could feel it get light, over the crest of the bumps, then sink in at the hollow of the bumps.
-the cars handle nicely, you can't spin 160* then come back like in GT
-very fun to drive, well modeled cars and tracks
-you can definatly feel understeer, oversteer

The Bad
- AI cars don't seem to really care if you are there, they are either blind or stupidly aggressive, even in open wheels they try take your wheels off.
-seems like all the cars i have driven have got a turbo (even some im sure dont)
-my graphics settings on a R9 280, couldn't see water on the road when it was wet,
-i still got good times with wet tires in the dry, maybe 1 second off
-auto clutch is too slow
-can't shift without a clutch if not using auto (and in EVERY manual i have driven, it is quite easy)

Verdict
after playing iracing.com, asseto corsa and many many other racing games, this is a welcome addition to my library

the damage is good, it is there, HOWEVER, i shifted my little Clio into 1st at 180 kays, got some MAD engine braking! no blown motor though.
damage is VERY forgiving, rubbing and crashing, there isn't much that happens to the car, maybe that is why they are soo agressive.
damage and clipping in iracing is shocking though.
last i played iracing was when the NTMv5 was out, that was alright, i mainly drove the mustangs, and the star mazda, JUST gotten into the 79 lotus F1's

just for general hooning, and driving it is good, there are some bugs or issues though, i would call iracing just over pcars, asseto corsa.

it is a different type of game to iracing though.

iracing made me feel intimidated at times, BANG 8pm race
damage was soo bad in iracing that some light knocks would make you unable to drive, (i did a LONG race in the star mazda on 3 wheels just go get the CPI up)
(also i entered a few sessions with Shane Van Gisburgen which was fun)

with the career mode, it feels like an simulator arcade game, not handling wise, but a game, where you can get your setup (gaming rig), just jump in, and race, no need to wait til 7:45 to qualify, then 8pm for the race, you can just jump in, do a race and done.
i am throughly enjoying it, and can't wait to get home to have a spin

Let me start off with this: I play GT occasionally and I have all but the ABS turned off when I play it. Playing Project Cars is something different entirely as I now have to take into account of the condition of the road or risk spinning out. I did not have to worry so much about this in GT.

the following comments are based on the most realistic settings in Project Cars with a PS4 controller except I have race engineer turned on.

Pro:
-Good physics: you can really feel that your suspension settings do make a big difference if you go over apex.
-Realistic handling of different vehicles: you can really feel that there is a difference between FWD, RWD and AWD cars.
-Graphics: very detailed tracks and cars
-Realistic simulation of a race instead of placing you in the middle of the pack at the start everytime (yes, I am talking about Forza and GT),

Con
-Bugs: lots and lots of game breaking bugs (erasing my car settings between practise and qualifying, graphic glitches, CTD, freezes at the grid....etc).
-Default setting on some cars are undrivable: most of the race cars are fine. however, the settings for some of the high-powered road cars are simply impossible to drive with a controller. Using Mclaren F1 for example, trying to go full throttle in a straight line is likely to cause a spin out.
-Lack of cars: I admit, I am not going to drive all of the cars available but the selection is very limited. Hardly any Japanese cars and most of the cars are from small European car firms.
-Unable to mod: I want to be able to modify the cars to behave a little bit differently

Loving it so far with a borrowed G27 wheel... handling is great when all assists turned off.

Only things I would like improved are tyre screeching/squealing sounds - at the moment they are pretty much inaudible. Need to be tweaked and the volume boosted a lot.

Also the force feedback needs to be improved. One example is that I can hardly feel any feedback when going over rumble strips - I have turned all force feedback settings up to max and played around with different configurations with no difference.

i forgot to mention in my previous post.
force feedback is actually good, you can change soo many aspects to it, just wait until some of the nutters out there define a proper set up, as i had ot up it to get any feel... the 98T was heavy as hell, but the clio is very light in th esteering.
you can actually feel the front end come loose (understeer) through the force feedback

Yeah just been reading the forums today, found these pages: http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/showthread.php?22122-G25-G27-SETUP-GUIDE,
http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/showthread.php?22938-Jack-Spade-FFB-Tweaker-Files

Will give them a go over the next couple of days, hopefully this will help!

Just so nobody misses it, THIS GAME IS BROKEN AS F*CK ON THE XBOX ONE.
http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/showthread.php?22817-Please-read-Xbox-One-Issues-UPDATED

Crazy handling glitches, weird reverse locking, terrible sensitivity controls. If you’re playing it with a controller, you should forget buying it at this stage. They are working on a patch which might fix it but until then buy with caution. 99% of reviews have been PC, PS4 with essentially performance comparisons for the Xbox, but if anybody bothered actually playing the game they might realise that the basic gameplay on Xbone (at least, I can’t speak for the others) is broken.

The developers are acknowledging “handling glitches” with a “small minority” of consoles but I’ve played it on 3 now with a variety of racing game fans (ie. I’m not just terrible at it like I am most racing games) and we’ve all had the same issues.

Apparently it plays well on the PC with an Xbox controller, so it is possible that they might fix it, but for now it’s an absolute mess (have a look on the Project Cars forum). The stick only registers 60% of movement on ALL settings (ie full lock at 60%), sounds cutting out when some buttons are pressed, cars swerving uncontrollably in a given direction. The glitches seem to be performance related because people are reporting being able to do more to fix the handling issues by tweaking the graphics than by changing the handling settings.

Anyway, screw you gaming journalists for failing to review the game properly. I don’t know about the other machines but this game is getting the “how good is Skyrim!” treatment without the “*unless you own a PS3” treatment for the Xbox at least.

I was playing on the Karts and it seemed to just hard lock in the opposite direction to what I was turning. I thought it was maybe me losing control but quickly realized it was a bug. Also there seems to be a big problem with the audio which randomly "goes all digital" and stutters really badly.

I hope they sought it out because I had pretty much written off my $100 bucks after about an hour of attempting to finish a single race on the Karts.

I guess that is another problem with purchasing a digital copy, once you've got it the chance of swapping it due to bugs is pretty much 0

I have waited for this to hit whilst getting pretty excited about it and..... its a bit 'meh'. I got my copy on the PS4, which didn't even include all the DLC.

Anyway, I turned on the game and watched the opening movie which I did truly think was pretty cool. From there I got a lovely lady introduce me to the menu system and tell me where things are that I might like to know about. I noticed that it is very clunky as some else mentioned and the menu system is almost exactly like GT5. Just a full screen with tiles on it - nothing much. The benefit is definitely that you can launch into an online race very quickly. Honestly, it all happens pretty quick to start to finish in an online race.

Generally - Cars do, really, sound good. Environments are pretty well craft but lack 'soul' as far as im concerned. Donnington raceway feels so boring and plain, there is just nothing there to make it interesting. The car views are a bit strange too - one in particular is IN BETWEEN the two front seat headrests! Yer... I know... weird.

Visuals - They are pretty tight. Lense flair and stuff is great. One thing that I cant stand though is the motion blur. Whenever you are racing, particularly turning corners, there is motion blur on almost every object outside the car. Seriously, its like double vision and its SO irritating. I have dug through the menus to work out if i can turn it off, but cant seem to find anything.

I started the career and went straight into the Karts. Very tight, twisty and unforgiving courses, you absolutely have to be on the edge and watching how the race unfolds. Im already sick of karts because some times it feels stupidly technical. When a mate of mine asked me how it felt over the weekend I responded with "imagine having to learn everything you have learnt in Gran Turismos over the past 10 years, again". Some might find that challenging and awesome, but I haven't yet. Im really waiting for that 'wow' moment.... but it just doesn't seem to be there.....

I bought it for Xbox One, ended up returning it because of all the issues I had with vehicle handling, as foggy mentioned. I managed to get used to it to a degree but it was more frustrating then it was worth. Ended up getting Dying Light instead.

I might give this a chance down the track when it has been fully fixed and dropped in price.

I bought it, played it, then then took it back for a full refund. Major issues with using a controller on Xbox One which makes it pretty unplayable no matter how you have the settings. Forza 5 is still the better game in my opinion for graphics, game play and sound.

Originally released on November 27th, 1998 in Japan, the Dreamcast was a shot at redemption after Sega's last console, the Saturn, had a less than stellar time competing with the Playstation and Nintendo 64. Something had to change in order for Sega to keep a horse in the console race. The Dreamcast had it all: incredibly powerful graphics, online capability through dial up, and a playful take on media. Hell, the memory card, also known as the Visual Memory Unit (or VMU) had a screen built into it. Sega was here to play and they did it wonderfully.